


i am lost, i think

by feralphoenix



Category: Hollow Knight (Video Games)
Genre: Brainwashing, Colonialism, Don't copy to another site, Gen, Genocide, Kidnapping, Memory Loss, Spoilers, Survivor Guilt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-18
Updated: 2020-07-18
Packaged: 2021-03-05 02:48:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,991
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25357249
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/feralphoenix/pseuds/feralphoenix
Summary: How fickle my ancestors must have been, grieved the seer; and the little knight wished they could still communicate at all so that they could tell her they doubted the true fault lay with the moths at all, tell her their increasing surety that the king of Hallownest had simply been a very bad man.
Comments: 34
Kudos: 101





	i am lost, i think

**Author's Note:**

> _(The body lives in present tense_ – —the way somebody comes back, but only in a dream.)
> 
> (guillermo del toro voice) [Its Not A Coincidence That He's Pale](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Aboriginal_religion_and_mythology)

The moths flocked to the skirts of the Wyrm Become Bug, the self-proclaimed new god and monarch of the deep kingdom. He was so bright! Never before had they known his like, or the like of his queen, that shining silver root so foreign compared to the soft greenery of the Mosskin or the dusky panoply of colors in the Fungal Wastes. A beacon with such coldness and such strength as to blot out the dark and the sky, to overwhelm the vision, to compel all attention and brook no disobedience.

The moths had been made _(by whom?)_ to be lightseekers. It was merely their nature: They could not help themselves. If some husbands, some wives, some partners—some parents, some siblings, some children—were not among the crowd that mingled with the beetles and isopods who knelt before the king, they were too dazzled, indeed too starstruck to take notice just then.

As if he had expected them there amongst his followers, the pale king smiled and welcomed them to his coterie. I have just the place to put you, he said to them. We have had need of people to protect our graveyards, he said to them. Welcome, my new subjects, to Hallownest; welcome to your new sapience.

If the moths found that to be ostentatious, for this had been their land—theirs, the mantises’, the mosskin’s and the bees’ and the arachnids’ and the shrumes’—for many a long age before this harbinger of white light’s advent, none spoke so.

And if the moths dreamed in those early nights of a familiar voice calling for them, of the warm embrace of sunlight, of gentle feathers stroking their faces—even the eyes of their hearts were still too raw from being scorched by the pale king’s beacon to understand what was happening.

These are not our children, said the moths.

That should not matter, said the pale king of the caterpillars his soldiers had brought to them, all very young, some barely hatched. They came from outside my kingdom’s reaches and they deserve to be raised in this realm of enlightenment, to grow up with intelligent minds. We do not want them to wind up like the beasts of Deepnest. And who best to raise these children other than you, my precious gravekeepers, who know better than we how to care for them?

OK, said the moths (though they were not in truth so crude before the wyrm who thought so highly of formality), and waited for the king and his soldiers to leave to look at one another with concern.

Of course they were not the sole tribe of moths in the world, for the world was so much vaster than any bug could ever fathom. But those faraway moth tribes were of different species than they, with wings in different shapes and colors, antennae in different sizes and lengths. And the young of those moths were of different forms as well.

Dazzled by the king’s hypnotic light they may have been, but the moths were still not fools entire. These caterpillars with which they had been entrusted were of their own tribe.

I want to go home, said one of the children who was old enough to speak. Said more than one of them. I miss my parents, my siblings, my friends.

Some of the moths of Hallownest simply tried to comfort these children as best they could, for wherever the children had come from, they certainly could not go back. This was the king’s will.

Where is home? asked other moths, the ones who were most concerned, or who had felt for some time now that something was very strange. And the little caterpillars named the tops of Crystal Peak, or the outskirts of the kingdom, or other places where they the gravekeepers were not allowed to go.

I don’t like it here, said one of the caterpillars. It’s so bright I can’t think, and even when I go to sleep at night I cannot hear her voice or see her face.

Whom do you mean, little one? asked those concerned moths, those thoughtful moths.

Who else could I mean? said the little caterpillar. _Her._ Radiance.

The little caterpillar was so insistent, as if it were absurd that they should even ask, but none of the adult moths knew who they meant. And in time, the caterpillar too forgot, beamed down upon by the king’s white light and busy learning the ways of the kingdom where they now must live.

But some of the adults remembered their foremothers speaking to them of strange dreams and a voice calling them home—remembered having such dreams in their own youth. These moths thought back upon how their people turned to the pale king as though having walked through a door, their minds pushing everything they had done before out to make room for what lay before them. And how, when they looked back, they had left no mark of their passage, as surely as if some other bug had swept the dirt clean of footprints and the trails their wings should have drawn.

And, though the moths were a gentle people, some took up the nail and the shell to explore the caverns, to find some clue to what else they might be forgetting.

Some returned empty-handed. Others did not return at all. Still more came back to the gravekeepers as unspeaking corpses with nail wounds upon their bodies. One moth approached the king to ask about why that was and returned not remembering why he had gone to the white palace in the first place.

But some moths brought back the memory of their tribe’s dream magic, and others brought back the story of the wielder of a mighty weapon foretold.

One moth climbed and flew to the top of the Crystal Peak, and found a faintly familiar statue: A crowned figure with wings, hewn from stone.

It has been decided that all children in the kingdom shall be housed at our schools, to better learn, said the pale king, and the hearts of the secret-keepers were filled with fear.

For many years, many generations they had kept their past alive in what ways they could: Teaching the children of Essence, guarding the Dream Nail, mimicking the denizens of Deepnest and weaving symbols of their history into their cloaks, their furnishings: Pale feathers and golden spirographs. They intertwined their magic with their protection of the kingdom’s peaceable spirits, so that it would have to be taught as a part of their duties, and could not be snuffed out or eclipsed by the unwavering white beacon of the king.

If a voice called out to the moths within their dreams, they still did not respond to it, but… though they did not reach out and remember, nor did they turn away from their past completely.

But if they had to give up their children—there was so much of their lingering scraps of culture that was easiest taught to the young. There would be so much of the pale king’s teaching to undo, besides the sorrow of families unable to meet.

It is only for a short while, said the pale king, and his voice was mild and reasonable. They will be back to you soon enough, once they have pupated and are fine upstanding adults.

And the moths were so very few already, those capable of wielding a nail fewer yet, and the king’s forces were many and they were powerful. So the pale king’s soldiers took the moths’ children away with him, and when those children returned fully grown they were quiet and somber, seeming more to belong to Nightmare than to Dream or Light.

The call the moths still dared not answer swelled from a song to a fiery trumpeting roar.

The other bugs of the kingdom began to hear her voice, too.

The pale king looked first to the moths, suspicious that they should try to supplant him, but saw the truth in their eyes when they said they knew the voice not. And so the king instructed his followers not to panic, to simply shut her cries out, to ignore her.

After that—it is all as history, fragmented though it may be, retells: The population become sleepwalkers, the king’s long string of atrocities sagging with the weight of the deaths of his many children, the last raised as a sacrifice to solve the problems he himself had engendered, and the sacrifice of the kingdom’s wise minds along with it. The pale king’s ultimate disappearance, when he could not stifle the light native to this land after all.

No cost too great for the preservation of his empire, quoth the Wyrm Become Bug: Yet the lands he named Hallownest paid and paid, and crumbled anyway beneath the weight of his great hubris.

How fickle my ancestors must have been, said the seer, last survivor of her people; how foolish. But as she spoke of her tribe’s supposed crimes the little knight could not think this great calamity truly their fault.

They looked down at their own claws, wishing they could tell her so. They had never, far as they knew, possessed a voice; but when they traveled outside of the kingdom’s lands, before they had heard the great fiery scream of grief and wrath and panic and frustration calling them—they had known shapes to make, with their claws and limbs. Shapes that carried the meaning of words, shapes they could use to communicate with other bugs. They could no longer recall those shapes. Indeed, when they were not looking at script written by another they could barely remember how to spell words, or even write letters. Even if they took out their precious map and ink and pen, they knew they would struggle to explain their thoughts in a way the seer could understand.

There was something deeply, truly _wrong_ with the kingdom of Hallownest. It ran so deep beyond the sleepwalking bugs leaking golden ooze. The little knight knew, _knew_ in a way that frightened them so badly they could not look it straight on, that the wrongness they sensed had been there well before the sickness.

At a loss, they rested their small claws atop the seer’s weathered ones, and tried to squeeze. It isn’t your fault, they thought fiercely. It can’t be your fault. The king was a bad man who did bad things to you and turned his back on everyone who believed in him. They had heard the cries of the dead begging their king for aid, for salvation. They had seen the corpses stacked high in every corner of the city.

Their claws passed through hers, though, as her body began to dissipate into Essence; and the little knight wished that _they_ could scream. More and more often it seemed coming to this place had stripped them of their every language but for violence, and they felt like a tool, an object, a cog popped into a great mechanism. Less and less a bug. What good were claws that could only hold a nail, and not speak for them or even comfort a dying friend?

Don’t remember us, the seer said to them, the seer who had told them why the living must remember the dead, especially in this kingdom that warped a bug’s memory and would take them away from themself. Don’t honor us, we do not deserve it.

I’m sorry, said the seer as if to something far away, over the top of the little knight’s head. Light… Radiance… I remember you.

The little knight wished they could promise to tell this Radiance so, to pass on the seer’s dying words, the immensity of her regard. But they already knew that even if they could find the being of whom the old moth spoke, they no longer had the means to tell anyone anything.

**Author's Note:**

> "kidnapping and brainwashing kids sounds pretty fucked up" it's really fucked up! it is also a [favorite](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stolen_Generations) [party](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Indian_residential_school_system) [trick](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Indian_boarding_schools) [of](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixties_Scoop) [white](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kidnapping_of_children_by_Nazi_Germany) [christian](https://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/09/world/saving-jewish-children-but-at-what-cost.html) [colonizers/imperialists](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half-caste_Act) and common instrument in [cultural genocide](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_genocide).
> 
> cw discussion of torture, child abuse (physical, mental, & sexual), child murder, and lots and lots of child harm of every kind you can imagine and more in articles linked above & in the sources they cite.


End file.
